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Social media platforms allow users to create polls to gather public opinion on diverse topics. However, we know little about what such polls are used for and how reliable they are, especially in significant contexts like elections. Focusing…
Current network-based methods for detecting coordinated inauthentic behaviour on social media focus primarily on inferring links between accounts based on common "behavioural traces" [19], such as retweeting the same tweet or posting the…
Social bots play a significant role in many online social networks (OSN) as they imitate human behavior. This fact raises difficult questions about their capabilities and potential risks. Given the recent advances in Generative AI (GenAI),…
Nowadays, social media represent persuasive tools that have been progressively weaponized to affect people's beliefs, spread manipulative narratives, and sow conflicts along divergent factions. Software-controlled accounts (i.e., bots) are…
Social media channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, have altered our world forever. People are now increasingly connected than ever and reveal a sort of digital persona. Although social media certainly has several remarkable…
Community detection is a fundamental task in social network analysis. In this paper, first we develop an endorsement filtered user connectivity network by utilizing Heider's structural balance theory and certain Twitter triad patterns.…
Online communications, and in particular social media, are a key component of how society interacts with and promotes content online. Collective attention on such content can vary wildly. The majority of breaking topics quickly fade into…
The accelerated development of social media websites has posed intricate security issues in cyberspace, where these sites have increasingly become victims of criminal activities including attempts to intrude into them, abnormal traffic…
Until recently, social media was seen to promote democratic discourse on social and political issues. However, this powerful communication platform has come under scrutiny for allowing hostile actors to exploit online discussions in an…
Social media platforms shape users' experiences through the algorithmic systems they deploy. In this study, we examine to what extent Twitter's content recommender, in conjunction with a user's social network, impacts the topic, political…
Political misinformation, astroturfing and organised trolling are online malicious behaviours with significant real-world effects. Many previous approaches examining these phenomena have focused on broad campaigns rather than the small…
Twitter bot detection has become an important and challenging task to combat misinformation and protect the integrity of the online discourse. State-of-the-art approaches generally leverage the topological structure of the Twittersphere,…
User-generated content (e.g., tweets and profile descriptions) and shared content between users (e.g., news articles) reflect a user's online identity. This paper investigates whether correlations between user-generated and user-shared…
We investigate the political roles of "Internet trolls" in social media. Political trolls, such as the ones linked to the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA), have recently gained enormous attention for their ability to sway public…
The propagation of rumours on social media poses an important threat to societies, so that various techniques for rumour detection have been proposed recently. Yet, existing work focuses on \emph{what} entities constitute a rumour, but…
"Media events" such as political debates generate conditions of shared attention as many users simultaneously tune in with the dual screens of broadcast and social media to view and participate. Are collective patterns of user behavior…
In this paper we propose a novel approach for Twitter traffic analysis based on renewal theory. Even though twitter datasets are of increasing interest to researchers, extracting information from message timing remains somewhat unexplored.…
Recent research brought awareness of the issue of bots on social media and the significant risks of mass manipulation of public opinion in the context of political discussion. In this work, we leverage Twitter to study the discourse during…
Online social media enables mass-level, transparent, and democratized discussion on numerous socio-political issues. Due to such openness, these platforms often endure manipulation and misinformation - leading to negative impacts. To…
Escalating proliferation of inorganic accounts, commonly known as bots, within the digital ecosystem represents an ongoing and multifaceted challenge to online security, trustworthiness, and user experience. These bots, often employed for…